Chap. II) 2- The genesis of the origin-understanding now goes before [248] itself in such a way that I have myself in that which is remembered. With this, I come to the problem of having-me-myself. "I myself" am a context of meaningfulness in which I myself live. -
Our problem is to find the original form of apprehending life itself. The path of our investigation therefore led over the self-world because in this way the idea of apprehending life itself can be most clearly apprehended, namely because this is where the objectifications that insert themselves and falsify ideas are the easiest to recognize and eliminate.
We are looking for the basic sense of the method in which life vitally apprehends itself as life. It is necessary to go back to the basic experience of factical life from it itself. This path over the self-world has nothing to do with psychology. The problem of psychology drops out of our consideration. In our concept-formations and our object-concept, we are not determined by psychology. From out of the science of the self-world, one can show, through transcendental considerations, that the psychological subject refers back to a non-psychological subject. (That is the path of transcendental philosophy that is common today and which started with Kant.) But we are not attaching ourselves to any science. Hence, for us the danger emerges that we must work with concepts from daily life such as "life, experience, I, me, self." With our work of critical destruction ( of the objectifications) these concepts are not clearly fixed. Rather, they just point to certain phenomena, they point into a concrete region, thus they have a merely formal character (sense of "formal indication"). The investigation of the formal-ontological [249] frameworks of these concepts is important. Yet the formal prejudices nothing about the things. There is an initial danger therein, that with the clear grasp of the formal ideas, these will be taken for the matters themselves [die Sachen selbst]. A second danger of the purely formal concept is that it leads to its opposite, the purely material concept. Thereby, what is meant by material concept lapses ( unnoticed) into a theoretical function.
Since Kant, the pair of concepts "form-content" plays a large role in philosophy. The formal concepts are merely indicating. They do not yet
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